Online Forum Discussion-Based Forecasting of New Product Market Performance

Abstract

Accurate new product market performance forecasts are important for proper resource allocation decisions before market launch. Traditional forecasting methods are based on concept tests, conjoint analysis, or diffusion models. Pre-launch forecasts are plagued with rather limited accuracy rates. Internet prediction markets have provided promising results but can be applied only when participants know the products. All these methods build on rather strong assumptions concerning consumer information processes and decision-making. The observation of prelaunch new product discussions in Internet discussion forums may provide the forecast required for resource allocation decisions concerning the early introduction stage of new products. This study analyzes the forecasting potential of word-of-mouth data acquired from prelaunch new ski discussions. Data was collected from online-conversations in three discussion forums concerning ten different new ski models before market launch. The communication among forum members was passively observed for several months. Results show high coherence between pre-launch new product evaluations and product performance after market launch.

Predictive competitive intelligence with prerelease online search traffic

“…The efficiency of predicting the success of a new product using PRB information has been well researched, as Table 1 illustrates. The majority of scholars focused on box office sales; others looked at the sales of music albums (Dhar & Chang, 2009; Hann et al., 2011), alpine skis (Mülbacher et al., 2011), and video games (Schaer et al., 2019b; Xiong & Bharadwaj, 2014). In their studies, they used a variety of PRB sources including forums (e.g., Craig et al., 2015; Liu, 2006), blogs (e.g., Divakaran et al., 2017; Onishi & Manchanda, 2012), Twitter (e.g., Asur & Huberman, 2010; Gelper et al., 2015), and Facebook (Ding et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2017).…”

Management of the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

“…In this phase it is also important that the community manager appreciates the activity of the members regularly and gives them feedback. The community manager supervises all discussions like a moderator to avoid unfairness and inappropriate content (Mühlbacher et al 2011). …”